I wouldn't want the Universal Monster movies to be compressed to hell so they could fit on the fewest discs possible. You have to remember some of these movies are very old and particulary Dracula has no original negative left so a good BD transfer would be the best way to see it short of going to the vault
hopefully not too close to slim cigarettes that has the print. Last time I saw an (European) 35mm print was a very long time ago, and I'd like to get something better than
that.
Dracula had a 18 mm tall negative and other Universal movies are 15.24 mm tall while a film like LotR has a 10 mm tall one, so a 18 mm b/w negative (if we had it) is of course 1.8x taller per picture height than a 10 mm negative. Using the rule of thumb that film resolution doubles about every 60 years, would make the old negative 0.45x less sharp, if both used the same emulsion and lens. Since one is b/w and b/w is sharper than colour film, and an old lens is worse than a new lens, lets leave that out for the sake of the argument (would be even more calculations). But wait. The LotR negative was scanned at 2K (83.33 pixels per mm) so the 10 mm x 24 mm final image was about 834 x 2000 pixels. Film has actually more resolution than that on the negative. So we scan the old film at 4k (166.67 pixels per mm) and we extract an usable 50% more than in 2K we get about 125 pixels per mm. 18 mm x 125 p/mm x 0.45x less sharp = ta da : 1012 pixels tall.
1012 > 834 (or 1000 > 800 in simple terms). Fine for a full height 1080p tall BD.
Now as I said we don't have the negative for that one. A 4K scan of a 2nd generation copy (print/IP) is similar to a 2K scan of the negative.
So we're back to the equivalent of 83.33 p/mm (2K) when we do the 4K of the second gen.
18mm
(if the 2nd gen wasn't reframed ;>) x 83.33 p/mm x 0.45x less sharp = 675 pixels tall quality. 675p. Not as good as 834 pixels. But similar what you get with a 720p HDTV full height image on a TV that has some overscan..
Lets do one of the late 40's ones that had the negative.
15.24 mm x 125 p/mm x 0.54x less sharp = 1034 pixels tall.
There are many factors that affect sharpness, improved techniques could be developed blah blah blah, but this is to give a rough idea.
Let's take The Searchers about 19 mm tall.
19 mm x 125 p/mm x 0.60x less sharp = about 1440 pixels tall.
From a second gen: 19 mm x 83.33 p/mm x 0.60 = about 960 pixels tall.
So you see, slapping sloppy compressed transfers of half a century movies shouldn't be our wish, just the opposite, the highest quality thansfers and compressions to extract the last iota of remaining image quality on these rapidly aging and precious films.
20 Milliom Miles To Earth has some fairly sharp shots when they're not opticals and that's just about 12 mm tall. The other day I caught it on AMC SD and it was much softer than the BD. Remember it's full of opticals (dupes) so that makes them grainier and worse than a fim that has most shots composed of the normal original camera negative film.
To answer the original question, I'd like most if not all of classic films on high definition. It's art, it's heritage, it's fun. And you haven't seen them like that in half centuries.
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